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"'Demeter in Paris' began, as many poems do, while I was avoiding writing something else. (In this case, it was an essay on the idea of '40' for my British publisher.) Some of the lines started as a meditation on being in the middle of one's life, but then something else took over. I began to think about an archetypal mother, who is at the mythical heart of our seasons, our ideas about how time passes, who also spends a lot of time alone. What does that solitude do to her sense of self? I wanted us to see her as more than a mother, or other than one. And lately I have been interested in poems that reflect a mind thinking and experiencing the world through representation, as this one does."—Meghan O'Rourke

Meghan O'Rourke

by this poet

We had a drink and got in bed.
That’s when the boat in my mouth set sail,
my fingers drifting in the shallows of your buzz cut.
And in the sound of your eye
a skiff coasted—boarding it
I found all the bric-a-brac of your attic gloom,
the knives from that other island trip,
the poison suckleroot lifted from God

I.
Because I was born in a kingdom,
there was a king. At times
the king was a despot; at other times,
not. Axes flashed in the road
at night, but if you closed your eyes
sitting on the well-edge
amongst your kinspeople
and sang the ballads
then the silver did not appear
to be broken.
Such were the

Grew up on the Jersey Shore in the 1970s.
Always making margaritas in the kitchen,
always laughing and doing their hair up pretty,
sharing lipstick and shoes and new juice diets;
always splitting the bills to the last penny,
stealing each other’s clothes,
loving one another then turning and complaining
as soon